What If You Just Started by Paying Your Employees a Living Wage and Letting Them Piss as Needed, Tho?

Jeff Bezos is really starting to get on my last good nerve:

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, on Thursday pledged $2 billion to combat homelessness and build preschools in low-income neighborhoods.

The Bezos Day One Fund will award grants to organizations and civic groups engaged in "compassionate, needle-moving work to provide shelter and hunger support" to young families, as well as fund a network of "Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities," Bezos said in a statement posted on Twitter.

"We'll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession," Bezos wrote. "The child will be the customer."

I don't even know what the fuck any of that nonsense means. But I do know the "principles that have driven Amazon" include abusing employees and exploiting corporate deregulation to build a monopoly that will gut entire communities and create devastating access deserts, so.

"The child will be the customer." Shiver.

Naturally, I am all for building more schools and giving hungry people all the food they want and need, but I am deeply suspicious of this proposal, which is a weird and unsettling hybrid of charitable giving and corporate marketing-speak. I've seen that before. It never turns out well.

And I wonder why it is that Bezos can't just give his $2 billion to the nation's "roughly 3.2 million full-time [K-12] public-school teachers [who] are experiencing some of the worst wage stagnation of any profession, earning less on average, in inflation-­adjusted dollars, than they did in 1990."

Like many men with more money than sense before him, he's going to give his money to consultants with claimed expertise who get rich recommending that the wheel be reinvented, rather than giving his money to people on the ground, who know how to use that money, who are already doing the goddamned work.

He's going to hasten the privatization of public education in the United States in the process. And the vulnerable kids he's claiming he wants to help are going to get hurt the most.